Posts tagged ‘quran’

This new generation isn’t interested in ideology, their slogans are all pragmatic and congrete; they don’t speak of Islam the way their predecessors did in Algeria in the late 1980s. Above all they reject corrupt dictators and demand democracy. That’s not to say that the demonstrators are secular, but simply that they don’t see Islam as a political ideology to be used to create a better order, they’re well inside a secular political space.

This is a continuation of Roy’s work over the past several years on “the failure of political Islam.” The basic idea here is that in part thanks to the example of Iran, you just don’t have a mass constituency that’s prepared to believe that Islam or Islamic rule offers answers to the concrete problems of poverty, corruption, and slow economic growth. People may be religiously observant or culturally conservative in ways that western liberals (or even western cultural conservatives) would find alarming, but the Egyptian people are asking “where are the jobs?” and don’t think the answer is going to be found in the Koran.

Any new jack in politics can tell you that conservatives dig big defense. Have a border problem? Put up a big wall. Have a terrorist problem? Build up your military so to surpass what we had against the Soviets. That is all quite debatable. What do you think of the below?

Andrew Sullivan makes a great point by saying whether or not the above action affects our troops, as hinted that it does by General Petraeus, it is very contra to protecting our national security (which the GOP loves to flaunt and rub in the Left’s face). We have to remember that the above video is by an extremist fringe (the Dove church has 50 members and the Westboro Baptist church has just under 100) but the comments and tendencies as of late by Right wingers on camera have not been praiseworthy.